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Date Posted: 10:46:55 07/01/07 Sun
With India's economy on fire, a holy river is fouled
Ganges River falling victim to nation's explosive growth.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
VARANASI, India — At first light, thousands of Indians come to the temple landings along this bend of the Ganges River to bathe in the water, which in Hindu religious belief purifies their souls. But the water itself is far from pure.
"The Ganges is India's holiest river, but it has become a toilet," said Veer Bhadra Mishra, director of the Sankat Mochan Foundation, one of the few Indian organizations trying to clean up the Ganges.
India's holiest river, the Ganges, is dangerously polluted with raw sewage collected in its travel downriver from the Himalayas. Devoted Hindus worship the river, believing that contact with the water purifies the soul and leads to salvation.
"Too often the media focuses on people bathing themselves or washing their clothes in the Ganges, but these are nothing compared to the raw sewage pouring into it," he said.
As India becomes a global economic power, government leaders have been slow to face the often deadly environmental impact of the country's explosive growth.
Instead, they have focused the bulk of the nation's limited resources on roads, airports and electricity to support the manufacturing and information technology sectors that are fueling the boom.
China and other developing countries in Asia and Africa face similar problems trying to balance economic growth with protecting the environment. But India faces mounting pressure to protect its supply of fresh water as climate changes nudge it closer to an era of water scarcity, according to a recent World Bank study.
The Ganges is not only the country's most important source of fresh water, it's also central to the religious beliefs of India's 800 million Hindus. In Hindu mythology, the river descended from heaven, and contact with it leads to salvation.
On most days, the landings near the river, known as ghats, are a confusion of color as hawkers sell their knickknacks under huge umbrellas and women wash their colorful silk wraps, called saris, in the water. Every year, millions of Indians make the pilgrimage to Varanasi to dip themselves in the Ganges or burn their dead along its banks on pyres of sandalwood and ghee.
As the Ganges winds from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal — passing at least 30 cities and thousands of villages along the way — it accumulates about 250 million gallons of raw sewage.
Recent samples collected in Varanasi show counts of fecal coliform, a potentially deadly bacterium, about 3,000 percent higher than the government's standard for water deemed safe for swimming or bathing.
At one of India's biggest Hindu festivals this year, thousands of holy men refused to dunk themselves in the river during the ritual washing ceremony saying that the river was too polluted. A handful of priests threatened to drown themselves in the river unless the government pledged anew to clean it up.
Only about 10 percent of India's 4,000 cities and towns have sewers and treatment plants. In the cities, streets often serve as open-air toilets. Even in such modern commercial hubs as Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai (also known as Bombay), most of the municipal sewage flows untreated into rivers, lakes or the sea, linking an environmental crisis with one of the most serious public health problems.
Diseases traced to water tainted with human waste continue to afflict Indians, especially the 450 million people who live in the Ganges basin. Poor water quality and lack of sewage facilities are blamed for most of India's 2 million child deaths a year, according to a World Health Organization study.
So far, efforts to clean up India's two major and most-polluted rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, which runs past the nation's capital, New Delhi, has been more symbolic than practical, critics say.
"The government put in place these action plans two decades ago and now the pollution in the rivers is worse," said Srinivas Krishnaswamy, an energy and climate change expert at Greenpeace in India.
Since the 1986 Ganges Action Plan, the government has spent about $300 million. Part of that money paid for three sewer treatment plants in Varanasi.
But as Varanasi's population soared past 3 million, the sewage quickly outpaced the capacity of the treatment plants. Adding to the problem are almost daily power outages, for hours at a time, triggering the plants' bypasses that release backed-up, untreated sewage into the river.
"The government's solution is not working," Mishra said. "Why build electric-powered treatment plants if there's not enough electricity to power them?"
That led Mishra, a Hindu priest and a former head of the engineering department at Benares University, to seek guidance from engineers at the University of California at Berkeley. They devised what they say is a cheaper, more sustainable method of sewage disposal using gravitational flow to collect the sewage into holding pools and sunlight to disinfect it.
Business leaders and ordinary citizens backed the plan, and government officials agreed to consider it, Mishra said. Nothing has been done since the plan was submitted.
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